The dental restoration of a partially or wholly edentulous patient with artificial dentition is typically done in two stages. In the first stage, an incision is made through the gingiva to expose the underlying bone. An artificial tooth root, in the form of a dental implant, is placed in the jawbone for osseointegration. The dental implant generally includes a threaded bore to receive a retaining screw for holding mating components thereon. During the first stage, the gum tissue overlying the implant is sutured and heals as the osseointegration process continues.
Once the osseointegration process is complete, the second stage is initiated. Here, the gingival tissue is re-opened to expose an end of the dental implant. A healing component or healing abutment is fastened to the exposed end of the dental implant to allow the gingival tissue to heal therearound. It should be noted that, in some situations, the healing abutment can be placed on the dental implant immediately after the implant has been installed and before osseointegration, thereby combining the osseointegration step and gingival healing step into a one-step process.
Some prior healing abutments were generally round in profile, but the artificial teeth or prostheses that eventually replaced the healing abutments were not. Thus, the gingival tissue would heal around the healing abutments creating a gingival emergence profile that approximated the size and contour of the healing abutment and not necessarily the size and contour of the final prosthesis that was eventually attached to the implant. The resulting discrepancies between the emergence profile of the patient's gingiva and the installed final prosthesis could sometimes require additional visits with the dentist or clinician to finalize the installation process and/or compromise the aesthetic outcome of the installed final prosthesis (e.g., the visual look of the patient's gingival tissue abutting the final prosthesis). Thus, in some instances in more recent years, standard healing abutments have been replaced with temporary prosthetic abutments.
Further, implant dentistry restorative methods have advanced beyond requiring a fixture-level (e.g., dental implant level) impression as the starting point for developing a final dental prosthesis. In some such cases pre-defined scan members (e.g., Encode® Healing Abutments available from Biomet 3i, LLC) are assembled to the dental implants during the gingival healing stage. The pre-defined scan members include visually scannable features (e.g., markers) that, when scanned using an intraoral scanner (IOS) and subsequently interpreted, provide information about the location and orientation of the underlying dental implant that is used in developing the final dental prosthesis.
However, these prior pre-defined scan members only include the visually scannable features on an exposed top occlusal surface of the scan members. Such a placement of the scannable features is required such that the scannable features could be visualized (i.e., picked-up) by the IOS scanner with the scan members attached to the dental implant in the mouth of the patient. Thus, the exposed top occlusal surface may have geometric limitations such that the exposed top occlusal surface was suitable for including the visually scannable features in a manner that readily allowed the visually scannable features to be picked-up in a scan and interpreted. And some pre-defined scan members may be installed in a patient's mouth during the healing period (e.g., for several months) such that the pre-defined scan members (especially their exposed occlusal surface that includes the scannable features) are subjected to wear and tear due to standard mastication, which could alter the scannable features and impact accuracy of future scans of the pre-defined scan members.
Although such methods using pre-defined scan members provide many benefits (e.g., improved aesthetics, reduced complexity, and potentially accelerated treatment times), such methods are reliant on intraoral scanning technology that must directly visualize an exposed surface with exposed visually scannable features thereon. A need exists for a restorative solution that does not require pre-defined scan members with visually scannable features thereon as to further improve restorative flexibility. The present disclosure is directed to solving these problems and addressing other needs.